Kyle Smith is a critic, journalist, and author known for his film and cultural commentary. He has served as a critic for the New York Post and later as a critic-at-large for National Review. He contributed arts and culture reviews to The Weekly Standard between 2005 and 2015.
It’s a heady moment for gay Americans. With victory after victory at the state level, public opinion on homosexuality having rapidly progressed from suspicion to grudging acceptance to celebration, and the Supreme Court seemingly on the verge of discovering a constitutional mandate that every state…
To open a Penelope Lively novel is to accept an invitation to the exhilaration of nuance. That is the kind way of putting it. To be less kind would be to point out that, despite Dame Penelope’s interest in the sweep of history, her internationalism, her dramatic twists and emotionally devastating…
What makes Stephen Fry so (his words) “slappable . . . odious . . . punchable”? Part of it is the smug expression, the striped socks. We may also curse the ubiquity. Here he is on dramatic television (Bones), film (Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows), hosting documentaries, whipping up novels,…
RAGING BULL has been acclaimed as a great American movie since the day it was released 25 years ago. Writing in the New York Times, Vincent Canby found it "a big film, its territory being the landscape of the soul," while Newsweek's Jack Kroll called it "the best American film of the year" and the…